Results: Sotheby's London Contemporary Art Evening Sale

On Tuesday evening, Sotheby's London held its Contemporary Art evening sale with a European record for a contemporary art sale.  The total hit $188.2 million (including buyers premiums).  75 lots were offered with 65 selling for a sell-through rate of 86.7%. Bloomberg reports this is a 40.5% increase over the same sale last year. The sale sold 93.6% by value and fell just shy of the total high estimate for the sale.  The top selling lot was by Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1986, oil on canvas selling for $46.3 million (see image).

Bloomberg reported on the Sotheby's

Paintings by Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon helped Sotheby’s reach 123.5 million pounds ($188.5 million), the company’s highest tally at a contemporary art sale in Europe.

The results on Tuesday in London represented a 40.5 percent increase from Sotheby’s evening sale of the same category a year ago but fell short of the high target of 125.5 million pounds. Of the 75 lots, 87 percent found buyers.

Collectors from 42 countries competed for works in a tightly choreographed event, with most boxes checked. There were trophy works by the biggest market earners such as Bacon, Richter and Andy Warhol; postwar art from Italy and Germany; Asian art and fashionable youngsters.

“These auctions are too big to fail,” said Sergey Skaterschikov, founder of Skate’s Art Market Research in New York. The auction houses “have to achieve a sell-through rate of over 80 percent to sustain the perception of a strong art market. They work very hard to make sure that the bidders are lined up for the key pieces.”

Sotheby’s sale launched a week of bellwether contemporary art auctions. The results are being watched for the indication of the art market’s strength in 2015, following record sales in New York when $2.3 billion of art was sold in two weeks in November. Christie’s contemporary evening sale is set for Wednesday, with Phillips on Feb. 12.

Same Names
“The market is big,” said Tania Buckrell Pos, managing director of Arts & Management International, a London-based firm that advises collectors, investors and museums. “There are a lot of collectors wanting the same names.”

The sale started with frenzied bidding for “Studio Hallway,” a figurative 2010 painting by Los Angeles-based artist Jonas Wood. Within the first minute, bidding surged from 45,000 pounds to 200,000 pounds as multiple hopefuls in the room and on the phones chased the work. The final price of 365,000 pounds surged past the high estimate and was 10 times the artist’s previous auction record.

Wood’s works are currently on view at the Hong Kong branch of Gagosian Gallery. The prices include commission; the estimates don’t.

The top lot of the sale was Richter’s 10-foot-tall abstract painting that fetched 30.4 million pounds, setting an auction record for the 83-year-old German artist.

Richter Record
Painted in 1986, “Abstraktes Bild” was estimated at 14 million pounds to 20 million pounds, the highest presale target of the 20 Richter paintings offered this week. The work was chased by three bidders and acquired by an unidentified American client of Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby’s co-head of contemporary art worldwide. It last appeared at auction in 1999, fetching $607,500.

The new price shattered Richter’s previous auction record of $37.1 million set in 2013 at Sotheby’s for the representational painting, “Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan).

A European client of Westphal bought the evening’s second priciest lot, Bacon’s 1977 ‘‘Two Studies for Self-Portrait,” which fetched 14.7 million pounds.

Despite attracting only one bidder, the work made a hefty profit for the consigner, who bought it in 1993 for 353,500 pounds. The seller realized a compound annual return of 19.4 percent, according to Michael Moses, a retired professor of economics at New York University and co-founder of the Mei Moses Art Index, which measures art performance by tracking repeat auction sales.
During the same period, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index gained about 9.3 percent.

Vertical Slashes
One of the top lots, Lucio Fontana’s “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” fetched 8.4 million pounds, exceeding its high estimate of 7 million pounds. The white horizontal canvas features 23 vertical slashes, displayed in two rows, one above the other. The 1965 painting attracted interest because it featured an unusually large number of cuts, said Buckrell Pos.

“I know collectors who are looking for more than one or two slashes on a Fontana,” she said, referring to the postwar Italian artist known for slicing the surface of his canvases.

Not everything was in high demand. A triptych by Alex Israel, a young Los Angeles artist whose prices soared to $1 million at auction in 2014, fetched 305,000 pounds, within the estimated range. A pink canvas by Takashi Murakami estimated at 400,000 pounds to 600,000 pounds, failed to sell. One of the auction’s two spray paintings by Sterling Ruby flopped; another fetched 569,000 pounds, within the estimate.

Source: Bloomberg